Surrealism Quotes

“I am Surrealism.”

“In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.”

“Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe where you were "sure" of finding shirts.”

“I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists as complete fools, but that young Spaniard Salvador Dali with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate.”

“As Focillon has written, there is a brain in the hand which, while drawing, will criticize, invent, erase—think new thoughts.”

“ENCYCLOPEDIA: Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superiority of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought.”

“All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art. While not all media of social or political protest, all are instruments and weapons of destruction...surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.”

“The more I look at most of the art movements, it's all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.
• Wikicommons: -inline”

“Surrealism lives, intensely and magnificently, having found and perfected an effective method of knowledge. Therein lies surrealism's dynamism. And it is precisely this sense of movement that has always kept it in the forefront of cultural and intellectual life, infinitely sensitive to the upheavals and disruptions of an epoch which is the "scourge of balance."”

“Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.”

“The great task of this century is that of revising the old scales of value in every field, of destroying worn-out customs and institutions and of constructing a form of society in which men may be able to make full use of all their faculties. Few poets...have set about this task with so great a thoroughness as the surrealists. Already they have succeeded in widening and deepening the total of human experience.”

“Modern psychology has revealed.. ..the symbolic significance of much of the imagery we customarily find in dreams and in works of the imagination. To a great extent Surréalisme derives from this branch of modern psychology: at least,it finds its justification in it. It seeks deliberately to create valid symbols, and the work of a Surréaliste like Max Ernst will make use of both abstract and concrete symbols.”

“Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.”

“The basic function of thought is to find ways of satisfying our needs and desires. The Surrealism of Breton and the functionalism of architecture which was more concerned with the way in which thought functions rather than with its function, — was initially idealistic. But is this not something which we can extract from Breton's definition of automatism?”

“Breton's Surrealists wanted to place themselves outside. What is it what they want to put outside? Pure thought. That is, the only metaphysical world, reflection. But from a materialistic standpoint thought is a reflection of matter — as in a mirror. The metaphysical world is not able to surmount the material world which produces it. One has to think of SOMETHING. But for thought to be dialectical, it's object / it's 'thing' must cease to be attached to everyday life.”

“Surrealism is, like all the offspring of Hegel, dialectical in its nature. That is to say, its aims are not best served if English writers imitate the work of French ones, nor if they simply adopt the name of 'surrealist.' Close study of the philosophical position of the French surrealists is needed to extract the essential purpose from the formal appearance of their work. But English writers will need something more; namely, a knowledge of their own language and literature.”

“Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arsholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the [Surrealist] group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.”

“In contrast to Breton we believe that — behind the false ethical and aesthetic, indeed metaphysical understandings which are out of contact with the vital interest of 'man' — we find the real, the materialistic ethics and aesthetics. One includes our needs, the other is an expression of our sensual desires. It is exactly in order to liberate the true ethics and the true aesthetics that we make use of ''''automatism.''''”

“Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

“I categorically refused to consider the Surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world.' I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'.”